Featured Speakers, Authors, and Guests
ĻӰ Military Writers’ Symposium
Speakers, Authors, and Guests
The biographies of our distinguished featured speakers, authors, and guests appear below. We invite you to learn more about them.
Kerry Chávez, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Military & Strategic Studies Department at the U.S. Air Force Academy and an advisor for Project Air and Space Power at the Irregular Warfare Initiative. Previously, she was a two-time nonresident research fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point and a fellow with the Institute for Global Affairs. Her research on the politics, strategies, and emerging technologies of modern conflict and security has been published in several venues. Dr. Chávez regularly collaborates with international and industry leaders on emerging threats, security solutions, and technology governance.
Sandor Fabian, Ph.D. is a former Hungarian Special Forces officer with 20 years of military experience. Dr. Fabian served in multiple national assignments including the senior Special Forces desk officer and advisor to the Hungarian Chief of Defense and held the Force Assessment and Evaluation Branch Head position at the NATO Special Operations Headquarters (now Allied Special Operations Command).
Dr. Fabian is currently the Deputy Regional Advisor for Europe and Africa at the DOD`s Irregular Warfare Center as a Morgan6 contractor and an instructor and curriculum developer at Leidos Inc. supporting the NATO Special Operations education, training, exercises, and evaluation efforts as a contractor. He is a graduate of the Hungarian Miklos Zrinyi National Defense University, holds a Master`s degree in Defense Analysis-Irregular Warfare from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, a graduate certificate in U.S. Intelligence Studies and a Ph.D. in Security Studies both from the University of Central Florida.
Dr. Fabian is the author of the book titled “Irregular Warfare: The Future Military Strategy For Small States” and published several articles in peer-reviewed journals including the Strategic Security Journal, the Defense and Security Analysis Journal, the Special Operations Journal, the Combating Terrorism Exchange Journal, the British Defence Studies journal and the Hungarian Sereg Szemle and Honvedsegi Szemle journals. Dr. Fabian has also contributed several articles at the Modern War Institute, the Irregular Warfare Initiative, the Small Wars Journal, and the British Royal United Service Institute. Dr. Fabian`s research interest includes irregular warfare, Russian and Chinese approaches to conflict, U.S. foreign security assistance and special operations.
Dr. Jill Goldenziel is a professor at the National Defense University College of Information and Cyberspace, where she teaches future generals and high-level civilian officials from the U.S. and 83 countries. She regularly advises military and government leaders on international law and policy. Through her consultancy, Jill Goldenziel Strategy, she advises corporate leaders on leadership, global threats, and business risk. She has spoken all over the world, including before Congress, corporate executives, and global leaders from 193 states at the United Nations. As an arbitrator, she has helped adjudicate multi-billion-dollar investment disputes. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
At NDU College of Information and Cyberspace, she teaches courses in international and constitutional law, leadership, strategy, lawfare, and information warfare to senior civilian and military leaders from the United States and allied and partner nations. She is a non-resident fellow at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe/Allied Command Operations Office of Legal Affairs. She is also an affiliated scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Fox Leadership International program and Penn’s Partnership for Innovation, Cross-Sector Collaboration, Leadership, and Organization. She is a Forbes.com and Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
Dr. Goldenziel’s award-winning scholarship focuses on international law, U.S. and comparative constitutional law, human rights, refugees and migration, lawfare, and information warfare. In 2022, NATO ACO/SHAPE Legal Office awarded her the Serge Lazareff Prize for her work as a scholar-practitioner of legal operations (lawfare). In 2023, she deployed with an elite Marine unit to the Philippines to advise on lawfare and information operations during the largest U.S.-Philippine binational exercise, Balikatan. She has helped establish counter-lawfare programs and activities at the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and other Combatant Commands and civilian agencies. She has received two Joint Civilian Service Achievement Awards from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for her work on lawfare and strategy.
Dr. Goldenziel’s award-winning research has appeared in the Cornell Law Review, the Harvard Journal of International Law, the American Journal of International Law, the American Journal of Comparative Law, the Virginia Journal of International Law, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, and the Arizona State Law Journal, among other scholarly journals. She has testified before Congress and briefed United Nations officials, world parliamentarians, and senior military leaders from 83 countries on her research.
Lieutenant General Groen, USMC (Ret), served more than 36 years in the U.S. military, culminating his career as the director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), where he led the transformation of U.S. joint warfighting and departmental processes through the integration of artificial intelligence. Before his role at JAIC, he served in the intelligence community through multiple assignments. He served in the National Security Agency, overseeing computer network operations, and as the director of Joint Staff Intelligence (JSJ2), working closely with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, secretary of defense, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and senior leaders across the department. He is an experienced Marine commander and multi-tour combat veteran. Lieutenant General Groen is a graduate of Calvin College and has earned master’s degrees in electrical engineering and applied physics from the Naval Postgraduate School.
Wade Ishimoto is a distinguished senior fellow with the Joint Special Operations University. He retired as the special assistant to the deputy under secretary of the Navy as a highly qualified expert in 2012 and was previously the senior advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict from 2004 to 2007. He is a retired Army special forces officer who served multiple tours in Vietnam and is a charter member and intelligence officer of Delta Force. He led a roadblock team during the 1980 attempt to rescue 53 American hostages in Iran.
His accomplishments include induction into the U.S. Special Operations Command Commando Hall of Honor, receipt of the Distinguished Public Service Medal awarded by the Secretary of the Navy, recognition as a distinguished member of the Special Forces Regiment, and receipt of the Distinguished Public Service and Citizenship Award from the Pan Pacific American Leaders and Mentors.
He led a White House-directed examination of security preparations for the 1984 Olympics, which resulted in major federal assistance to federal, state, and local agencies supporting security for those games. He has been featured in the books Delta Force, The Guts to Try, Best Laid Plans, Those Gallant Men, Killer Elite, Never Surrender, and A Murder in Wartime.
He graduated from the University of Hawaii with a major in Asian studies and obtained a master’s degree in human resources development from Webster University. He is a former chief instructor of Shinbudo Kai Aikido, holding a sixth-degree black belt, and has also taught Goju Ryu Karate. He and his wife, Bobbi, reside in Virginia.
Wayne E. Lee is the Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina and currently the Charles Boal Ewing visiting chair of military history at West Point. He is also president of the Society for Military History. Lee received his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1999 and taught at the University of Louisville before joining UNC in 2006. His most recent book, The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800 (UNC, 2023), won the 2025 Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award. He is co-author of The Other Face of Battle: The Experience of Combat in America's Forgotten Wars (Oxford, 2021). Other books include Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History (Oxford, 2016), Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865 (Oxford, 2011), and Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War (Florida, 2001).
From 2015 to 2016, Lee held the Harold K. Johnson Visiting Chair of Military History at the U.S. Army War College, and in 2021-2022, he was the Colin S. Gray visiting chair of strategic studies at the U.S. Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. Before his academic career, he served as a combat engineer in the U.S. Army.
Simon Shuster has reported on Russia and Ukraine for over 15 years, most of that time as a staff correspondent for TIME Magazine. Born in Moscow, he and his family came to the United States as refugees from the Soviet Union when he was six years old and settled in San Francisco.
After graduating from Stanford University in 2005, Simon returned to Moscow to work as a reporter for The Moscow Times, Reuters, the Associated Press and other publications. His political coverage of Russia's descent into authoritarianism included numerous profiles of Vladimir Putin and interviews with Dmitry Medvedev and other top Russian officials. He has also interviewed and profiled the last three presidents of Ukraine, starting with Viktor Yanukovych, whose violent overthrow in 2014 he covered from Independence Square in Kyiv.
That winter, Simon was the first foreign reporter to arrive in Crimea as it was occupied by Russian troops. Since then, he has spent years covering the war in Ukraine from both sides of the front lines. The year after the annexation of Crimea, Russian authorities deemed Simon a security threat and banned him from entering the country.
Simon first interviewed and profiled Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the spring of 2019, when the actor and comedian was in the middle of his longshot campaign for the presidency. Since Zelensky's election victory, Simon has been granted unparalleled access to his administration, his close friends, aides and staffers. He has traveled three times with President Zelensky to the front lines of the war in Ukraine and spent months reporting from inside the presidential compound in Kyiv as the Russian invasion unfolded.
He is the author of The Showman – Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky (January 2024). He is the 2025 William E. Colby Military Writers' Award winner.
Featured ĻӰ Faculty and Students
Oliver Groom was born in Scotland in 1997 of English and Scots parents, then moved with them to Lyons, New York, where he grew up. Groom developed an interest in history at a young age, and his final research project in his senior year of high school was the modern history of total war from the American Civil War into the twenty-first century. From 2015 to 2018, as an undergraduate student at Rogers State University in Claremore, Oklahoma, his passion for military history continued, and he was fortunate enough to study with ĻӰ’s own Dr. John Broom and Dr. David Ulbrich, among others. Groom's current research focuses on Britain’s historical experience of total war, particularly during the life and times of Winston Churchill. For his M.A. Thesis, which was completed in February 2025, Groom wrote about Churchill’s understanding of total war from his Victorian childhood to the end of the First World War and its significant impact on his eventual rise to power in May 1940 as Britain’s Prime Minister and Minister of Defense during the Second World War. He plans to continue his higher education as a Ph.D. candidate, potentially in the United Kingdom. He is the Dennis E. Showalter Research Fellow for this year's symposium.
Presentation Title:
Great Game, Great War: Winston Churchill’s Indirect Approach to Total War, 1914-1918
Jayden LaVecchia is a Junior from Post Falls, ID, pursuing a Bachelor's Degree in Studies and War and Peace with minors in Chinese, Information Warfare, and Intelligence and Crime Analysis. On campus, Jayden is actively involved with several activities, including the Corps of Cadets, Cyber Leader Development Program, NUARI, FCA, and the Democratic Resilience Center at Helmut Schmidt University. He is currently contracted with the Army, pursuing later work in Information Warfare and Narrative Security. His research analyzes patterns in historical information operations and establishes a new Cognitive Vulnerability framework and Heuristic Narrative Security program for cognitive security. He is a Richard S. Schultz '60 Symposium Fellow.
Dr. W. Travis Morris joined the faculty of ĻӰ in 2011. He teaches criminal justice in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and directs NU’s Peace and War Center. He teaches criminological courses in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and directs NU’s Peace and War Center. Morris holds a Bachelor of Arts in criminology from Northern Illinois University, a Master of Science in criminal justice from Eastern Kentucky University, and a doctorate from the University of Nebraska. He has published on information warfare and the relationship between policing, peacekeeping, counterterrorism, and counter-insurgency and is the author of the recent book, “Dark Ideas: How Violent Jihadi and Neo-Nazi Ideologues Have Shaped Modern Terrorism.” He has conducted ethnographic interviews in Yemen and published on how crime intersects with formal and informal justice systems in a socio-cultural context. His research interests include violent extremist propaganda analysis, information warfare, and text network analysis. He is an active teacher in and out of the classroom and has created a series of recent grant-funded student learning trips in the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
R. Pierce Reid is a ĻӰ Alumni with a Masters in Military history. He began his career in marketing which led to working in psychological operations and military information operations. He served as a speaker and later MC of the ĻӰ InfoOps Symposium during the late '90's and early 2000's. He has published and consulted on Information Warfare since the early 2000's. He is currently retired from industry and defense and Chairs the Friends of The ĻӰ Military Writers Symposium and occasionally lectures on psychological warfare at ĻӰ.